


Agonist

by micehell



Category: The Ghost Writer (2010)
Genre: Drama, M/M, White Room, a touch of angst, takes place after the movie but still not technically AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-31
Updated: 2010-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-12 04:08:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/micehell/pseuds/micehell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eventually they’ll have to decide.  No one will let them stay there forever, in a limbo of white room, white sheets, and pain that has no color.  Heaven or Hell has to come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Agonist

**Author's Note:**

> The HEA person in me hated how the movie ended, which is why I wrote this... well, and because Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan make a pretty picture in my head. ;) 
> 
> I ~~stole~~ reference bits from Shakespeare, Greek mythology, vague hints at Dante and Milton, plus, of course, Douglas Adams and _Airplane_ , so if something seems familiar, it probably is. :P

It took him a long time to realize that the white was an actual color rather than just an absence of the dark. The pain was what gave it away, darker than the absence of white, and he avoided it whenever he could.

~*~

White was a color that came with pain, and the voice was sound where there been only his own silence. He didn’t listen at first, letting it drone on in the background; like a tv left on, an airport announcement. _All New!_ _Whiter, Brighter!_ _The red zone is for loading and unloading only._

Once, when the pain was starting to be louder than the voice, he thought he heard it say _Two to the power of one hundred thousand to one against, and falling_ , and he laughed silently as the white faded away.

~*~

Eventually the pain diminished enough to be padded by the drugs and the white resolved itself into objects: walls, ceilings, sheets, floors. The voice talked through it all, until even it resolved into something besides noise.

It was wrong, though, a voice that belonged to the dead. He wondered if he himself was dead, but it didn’t bother him much, filtered through the drugs, the white, and the voice that was low and melodic, with the natural inflections of a storyteller.

The story being told was familiar; meeting a girl at college, going from dabbling in politics to being mired in them, struggling to do the right thing and watching it all slip through his fingers anyway.

 _Didn’t I just write this_? was what he thought as he fell back out of brightness.

~*~

Lang’s voice was the first thing he heard when he woke up again. Hoarser now, as if Lang had talked him back to waking, Orpheus leading Eurydice home. The absence of anything but white and a dead man’s voice made him wonder if Lang had looked back, damning them both to some strange hell forever.

“She had a way of making what she wanted seem right, and what you wanted seem selfish. Ruth really should have just gone into politics herself… but then I guess that wouldn’t have worked for what she wanted.”

Ruth’s name made him shiver, not even the drugs that drip, drip, dripped from the tube in his arm able to dull remembered pain. He could see it all again, white flashes behind his yes: car lights, panic, pain, nothing.

“Am I dead?” His own voice was hoarser than Lang’s, drawling out into near incoherence from lack of use and opiates.

There was a startled pause, as if Lang hadn’t realized he wasn’t alone, but then he answered, “Dead? Not _quite_.”

A laugh came with that, but he was too tired to parse it out, and he fell asleep with car lights running through his mind.

~*~

When he woke again, his world was still white, but the pain was sharper, brighter. _Scaling back the drugs_ , he thought. _Definitely not heaven, then_.

Lang’s voice wasn’t present this time, but the man himself was, sitting on a white chair at the foot of his bed. Lang’s head was bobbing, sleep pulling it down, making the scar that ran down the right side of it visible, the hair across it shorter and whiter than he remembered.

He thought about letting Lang sleep, but then remembered that he didn’t really like him all that much. Curiosity was definitely a stronger pull than civility. “If I’m not quite dead, what are you?”

The bobbing head shot up at that, the blue eyes wide in surprise and bright against all the white surrounding them. It took a moment for them to clear, for recognition to set in and the practiced smile to grace the face again, but then Lang was all smooth edges again. Only the scar, barely visible, showed the human underneath.

“Not quite dead, as well. Rycart’s gift to us both. He couldn’t save us, not from the CIA, but he could at least arrange for our deaths to be only for show.” Lang paused, head tilting quizzically to the side. “Should I consider that a favor from a friend? Or more a crafty politician keeping game pieces in play?”

He could have laughed at Lang’s calling another politician crafty, but the amusement faded in the face of everything he didn’t know. What did you do when you were not quite dead? He couldn’t go back to his apartment, now, nor any other part of his old life, not without becoming fully dead, at least. He looked at Lang, wondering if there were any answers there, but all he saw was the white streak of hair that marked the end of Lang’s life as well.

It was a relief when the nurse stepped into the room. She was older and gnarled like a tree, but her scrubs were bright pink and her skin was milk coffee and she wasn’t dead in the least, and that was all he could ask for at the moment.

~*~

Lang wasn’t always there, but usually he woke with that soft, lilting voice telling stories of another life. Since his only other visitors were the nurses (colorful, cheerful, just doing their jobs) and the MI5 agents (dark, brooding, just doing their jobs), he never complained about the stories, or the man.

Without the pressures of a failing marriage or an incipient trial, Lang became less charming, but more human. The charm gave way to real amusement and the stories became the kind that everyone told, people and places his audience didn’t know and didn’t really care about; mundane and real.

He liked the stories even for themselves, learning the people and places as if he were a ghost again and getting ready to tell the stories himself. But he especially liked them after the agents had been there, with their bleak recital of what he would receive to help him with his new life, and their brusque warnings of what he would receive if he should try to step back into his old one. Lang’s stories, even the ones that went on tangent after tangent, until both of them had forgotten what the original story had been, were bright spots against a looming future.

Lang smiled at him as he laughed at his own joke, wide, toothy grin running along the lines of his face, and he couldn’t help but smile back, sharing in the joke of being not quite dead.

~*~

It made no more sense with the husband than it did the wife; fear, loneliness, even propinquity having something to do with it. But Lang’s hands were capable and strong, and when they gripped his dick, they weren't the hands of a former prime minister, nor even the hands of someone not quite dead. They were just the hands of someone who wanted something, and wanted to share something, and wanted. He didn’t have to think about the future or the past when those hands touched him. He didn’t have to think at all.

~*~

“You did this with her.”

It wasn’t a question. Lang didn’t even look jealous, his face slightly red from effort, drawn up in pleasure.

“Well, not _this_ , literally, since she was missing some necessary equipment, but, yes, in general.” There was no point in lying now, all his sins washed away by something like death.

Lang thrust a little harder, laughing as he did it. “Remember that. That she didn’t do this to you. Only me.”

He could explain about why it was a bad idea when he stayed in client’s houses. About how he didn’t always wind up sleeping with the client’s _wife_. He could tell his own stories about people and places Lang didn’t know, and that Lang certainly wasn’t the only person to fuck him, but frankly he was feeling too good for that much honesty. Now that he’d started over, he could always start over in the lying by omission as well.

All he did say was, “Do that again.”

~*~

They do it again. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, two walking shadows with little to do besides each other, and a common goal of not thinking about much beyond.

Eventually they’ll have to decide. No one will let them stay there forever, in a limbo of white room, white sheets, and pain that has no color. Heaven or Hell has to come. But in the meantime, he pulls his legs up to his chest, stretching them as wide as near forty will let him, and takes Lang in deeper. They take their time, urgency lost to creeping age, but certainly the pleasure is still there. Even in the burn of stretching muscle and the ache of what they’d lost, there was still that.

/story


End file.
